Duggan James - A murder without motive : the killing of Rebecca Ryle

A MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE

Martin McKenzie-Murray is The Saturday Paper s chief correspondent. He is a former Canberra speechwriter, political columnist for the Age , and adviser to the chief commissioner of Victoria Police.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2016

Copyright Martin McKenzie-Murray 2016

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Earlier versions of parts of this manuscript have appeared in various publications, including The Drum , Lifted Brow , Kings Tribune , and The Saturday Paper .

Quoted epigraph from Soon Enough by The Constantines, reprinted with the kind permission of GalleryAC Music; quoted material in Introduction from The Journalist and the Murderer (2012) by Janet Malcolm, reprinted with the kind permission of Granta Books and Janet Malcolm.

9781925321357 (Australian edition)
9781925228618 (UK edition)
9781925307511 (e-book)

CIP records for this title are available from the British Library and the National Library of Australia

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For Rebecca

Years from now, they will make water from the reservoirs of our idiot temper / Soon enough, work and love will make a man out of you.

Soon Enough, Constantines

Youve got yourself involved in something big, young man.

Detective Sergeant Terence Rakich

CONTENTS

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

INTRODUCTION

We were eating breakfast in McDonalds when my parents told me they were going to Rebeccas funeral later. I wished theyd said something earlier. I wanted to go, but I wasnt dressed properly: T-shirt, distressed jeans, filthy canvas sneakers. My cultivated slackness was completed by long, greasy hair an emulation of my art-heroes, The Beatles and doubtful patches of facial hair. I had just returned from a quixotic spell teaching in South Korea, where Id been delaying the real and imagined strictures of adulthood. It was 2004, and I had just turned 23.

When I returned, everyone was talking about the murder. I had temporarily moved back in with my parents in Perths northern suburbs. A week before, just a few streets away, a young womans body was found on the grounds of the primary school. Rebecca Ryle had been strangled, her body found at sunrise and damp from sprinklers. Her cardigan was torn, her bra twisted, and her pants flung up onto a classroom roof. Her pink underwear lay beside her, and the scene was dotted with the contents of her handbag: ATM receipts, hair scrunchie, broken sunglasses. Rebecca Ryle was 19, and her home was just 50 metres away the length of a swimming pool lay between her body and her front door.

My parents hadnt known Rebecca Ryle or her family, but my brother knew the man who had already been charged with her murder. Cameron had known James Duggan for years. They were both 19, and had once chugged beer in car parks and pulled bongs made with punctured Coke cans. They had once joined house parties swollen with aggression, where ones personal worth was expressed by a capacity to withstand or commission violence.

They had never liked each other. They had, in fact, grown mutually contemptuous. Years later, Cameron would tell me, It wasnt long before I figured out he was someone I didnt want to be friends with. He was a bit loopy. But for the next five or six years he was still friends with my friends, so I was always in contact with him, one way or another. As far as I was concerned, I didnt like him, and he didnt like me. We were quite honest about it. Of the people we were hanging around, and the sort of environment it was, everyone had their tough-guy acts on, but after getting to know people, that would sort of break down. But with him it never did. He never seemed right to me.

Cameron and James orbited each other anxiously, tethered by peer groups and suspicion. My brother despaired of his mates tolerance of him. The last time Cameron saw him, James had uttered some sullen obscenity at him. Cameron turned and felled him with a punch. I was standing over him, he told me. James sort of cowered, and everyone else laughed, and I remember someone else saying, I told you he was a pussy, because he always had this guard on; but when it came down to it, he stayed on the ground. And that let me know he was a lot weaker than he put on.

Cameron hadnt seen James for almost two years when he heard about the killing. He was on a bus heading home to Mum and Dads that was tracing its way around the school. The scene was teeming with authorities, and the buss usual route was blocked. As it made its detour, Cameron stared curiously at the police tape. He realised what hed seen when he watched the six oclock bulletin that evening. James was the first name that came into my head when I heard. And I said that to a friend of mine. I saw it on TV, and my friend called straight after. There was certainly shock. James had popped into my mind, but its a natural reaction to guess when you hear its someone your own age who lives down the road, but I guess I didnt really believe it couldve been him, even though I had guessed it was.

The murder aroused tender instincts among locals, and the proximity of the victims home became a source of sombre astonishment. The Ryles front lawn was quickly carpeted with bouquets, and they were brought meals by neighbours. If the murder hadnt quite galvanised the community, it provided a melancholy focal point. The local newspaper shared the Ryles decision to hold a public funeral, and my parents felt obliged to attend and bear witness. In retrospect, it was touching. My parents arent very social. Growing up, I dont recall any sermons about the importance of community. In fact, I suspected that community for them was an irritatingly vague and fatuous concept. But in McDonalds that morning, they surprised me with their commitment to this imagined community and to subtly enhancing the dignity of Rebecca with their presence.

The fact we were in McDonalds appalled me. It was a reminder of the casual vulgarity of the suburbs I had once escaped: first, via university; second, by the more elaborate rejection involved in moving to an outer district of Seoul. I was bothered by the white noise of the wastelands a studied indifference to culture and enlightened ambition. I was of these suburbs, but the very thing my parents had desired for me a university education had transformed me into a relentless and obnoxious critic of them. They were unimpressed with my cultural cringe, and how it implicated them. I was an awful snob. And as I sat there eating my sausage and egg McMuffin, I assumed that this vast ocean of banality had somehow contributed to Rebeccas death. Jamess milieu had been mine.

I was supercilious. My thinking went something like this: McDonalds represented immediate and witless pleasure. And in my head, it was all messed up somehow with high school, which, with a few years hindsight, I now detested as a locus of bigotry, boredom, and violence. It was also much more than that, of course often quite safe and stale and normal. While my brother knew James Duggan, I thought I knew many just like him dull kids content to practise their cruelties in car parks and at house parties. Here were the Badlands: a place not materially impoverished, but haunted by low expectations. Homeowners might have been shocked by the killing, but my brother and I werent. Cameron had been whipped with bike chains, nearly run over, and had seen his mates head scrambled with a baseball bat.